DDA

My North Korean readership has been warning me to get out of the United States before I’m deemed an enemy.

“Come to Promised Land,” one man wrote me. He claims he’s a cabinet member in Kim Jong Un’s regime. I haven’t verified it, but at least his heart seems authentic. “You share luxurious condo with Dennis Rodman.” (I get many letters from the Hermit Kingdom)

I don’t know about you, but I relish this Sony hacking scandal. To watch Sony squirm under the pressure of North Korean hackers releasing the giant studio’s dirty laundry. And the state-approved media outlets amplifying the most trivial, but embarrassing parts. What skeletons does Sony hold in their closets that they would cancel another promising, comedy-raunch film?

Speaking of skeletons, my fans in North Korea don’t always get enough to eat, but the situation there is complicated and maybe we Americans judge their solitary kingdom with too much ignorance. Sixteen million children go hungry here as well. The North Koreans point that out often, as do I. That’s why my NK readership has ballooned in the past few years.

“You only American who don’t think you guys number one,” a reader wrote last year.

“I’m not the only one,” I wrote back, “not any more, now that the real unemployment rate hangs above 12 percent nationally, and healthcare costs rise higher than rent, and racial tensions are violent movements on the back streets of Midwest American cities, and trillions of our taxpayer dollars have been used to prop up a global banking system that would be, in any other context, a breathtakingly intricate Ponzi scheme, and the only way Americans stuff all that tension and dis-ease down their gullets is by tuning out to a childish movie with filthy humor and a plot so diminutive it’ll shrink an unshielded brain stem within thirty minutes. Like The Interview.”

I’m assuming the hackers are North Korean. But don’t believe anything your government tells you. That’s first. This could easily be an FBI plot to garner American support for harsher sanctions and condemnation for our North Korean friends. The CIA has pulled off stunts far greater than cooperating with a movie studio to cut a dumb film after the international bad guys threaten its release.

Other people have cuter ways to view this quagmire. President Obama said Americans should go to the movies this weekend. That’s how we fight terrorism and enhance freedom. By getting your brain stem pounded by a barrage of meaningless lights and sounds.

I don’t go to movies. I avoid them like my North Korean readers avoid criticizing Kim Jong Un’s new haircut.

Every time I see a blockbuster film, I am slammed by the writers’ psychological shortfalls and petty desires playing out in emotional bursts of orchestrated stimulation. And that pettiness seems to get worse every year.

I’d like to continue to avoid that like I avoid McDonald’s and KFC’s so-called food. It looks like food, it has a general sense of nourishment, but once you quit consuming their products, and the grease finishes seeping out of your pores, and your liver processes that last strand of trans-saturated fat and hormone cocktail the chicken absorbed into its muscles while they were still alive, then you can take a swing at more vibrant living. Then you realize you were slowly being poisoned, drugged into a stupor.

Scientists are understanding the stomach is a second brain. The stomach’s walls are lined with 100 billion neurons. At least that’s how many our scientists could count so far. So imagine a lifestyle of feeding both the brain and the gut such empty, trivial products that neither can cope properly. The American diet, physically and mentally.

And yet, there are other even less sensitive viewpoints on the Sony hacking scandal. While some may deem these outlying viewpoints controversial, my North Korean screen-readers take satisfaction in them. That’s an understatement. They live for them.

Humdinger, in a breathless interview yesterday afternoon over Skype, told me, “What we’ve learned by this Sony hackers scandal is that there is at least one group of people on this planet not afraid to rout the Hollywood Zionists and scatter them like roaches fleeing a laser beam of Southern California sunshine.”

Humdinger didn’t say much more on the topic. He had to get back outside to shovel snow off his roof, where he lives in an undisclosed part of Northern Europe. I told him that President Obama said Americans, in retaliation to the hacking threats, should go to the movies.

“He also told the world one bright spot in the global economy is the American film industry, especially Hollywood,” Humdinger said, “and I was reminded that during my teenage years the one bright spot in my life after coming home from school was whacking off into an unwashed gym sock. But I’m thankful I got over that. Now I take pleasure in scooping snow more than watching a screen showing someone’s bad childhood manifest through fits and starts of a plot structured around enough stimulation to please an eight year old.”

The old philosopher disconnected his headphones at that moment. He stood back from the computer, tore off the snowy winter hat he’d been wearing, and whipped it against his leg. Humdinger put it on his head again and yanked it over his ears. He walked out and I stared at his empty living room for a few minutes before I ended the call.